42 The New York ReviewRoger Leenhardt, and Georges
Franju—with a selection of films that
either anticipate its freedoms or, in the
case of Franju, share contemporane-
ously in its spirit. Leenhardt—a philos-
ophy student turned film critic whose
theories of cinematic realism so greatly
influenced the New Wave that Godard
featured him in Une femme mariée
(A Married Woman, 1964) as a char-
acter who returns from the Frankfurt
Auschwitz trials and delivers a famous
discourse on the nature of intelligence,
and Truffaut accorded him a small role
in L’Homme qui aimait les femmes
(The Man Who Loved Women, 1977)
as a publisher—is represented by his
debut feature, Les Dernières vacances
(The Last Vacation, 1948).
The film opens in a schoolroom as
the teenage student Jacques daydreams
over a photo of his family at their
country house in the South of France.
Jacques dotes on the photograph be-
cause it represents a past that has sud-
denly vanished, leaving him unmoored
and vulnerable. The film flashes back
to the final summer Jacques’s clan gath-
ered in the house, where the increasingly
impoverished amateur photographer
and widower Walter lives with his young
daughter, Juliette, and his eccentric sis-
ter, Délie. When the children discover
that their beloved summer home is to
be sold, they conspire unsuccessfully
to prevent the sale. Jacques’s sense of
impending loss is compounded when
his girlfriend, Juliette, begins to flirt
with the architect who has arrived
from Paris to plan the renovation of the
house into a luxury hotel.
Leenhardt later made over fifty short
documentaries about French writers
and artists, and Les Dernières vacances
reveals both his literary sensibility
and his painterly eye. The script relies
heavily on the motif of fire, repeatedly
invoked to express both the incendi-
ary nature of youthful ardor and the
imminent threat of disaster. A festive
display of Venetian lanterns suddenly
bursts into flame. The architect berates
the children for lighting a bonfire in
the midst of a dry forest. A sickly boy
contemplates a “devouring fire” as he
surveys a large box of matches and
later lights just such a conflagration
in a crumbling tower full of hay in an
attempt to trap the architect, an “acci-
dent” that Walter suspects is an act of
spontaneous combustion.
Leenhardt’s modesty and concern
for “didactic clarity,” as he once put
it, occasionally turn Les Dernières va-
cances toward literary convention. But
the film clearly presages the New Wave
in its self- references (Walter represents
Leenhardt’s long- held interest in pho-
tography), its lyrical location shooting
in the Gard countryside, and especially
in its celebration of youthful rebellion.
Jacques’s sense of perpetual chastise-
ment and his wounded disillusion with
the adult world—“It’s all fake! It’s all
fake!” he cries—foreshadow the figure
of Antoine Doinel, Truffaut’s trouble-
making alter ego in his own feature
debut, Les 400 Coups (The 400 Blows,
1959). A film that anticipates not only
the New Wave but, further afield, Ber-
trand Tavernier’s Un dimanche à la
campagne (A Sunday in the Country,
1984) and Olivier Assayas’s L’Heure
d’été (Summer Hours, 2008), Les
Dernières vacances richly deserves re-
newed attention.
Astruc’s medium- length Le Rideau
cramoisi (The Crimson Curtain, 1953)opens with a portentous quote from the
Marquis de Sade—“THE CRIMES OF
LOVE.... Heinous crimes, unblem-
ished by steel or poison”—but its ele-
gant tale of passion ending in death is
more suggestive of Stendhal and Poe.
During the Napoleonic Wars, an ar-
rogant young officer is billeted by an
older couple, whose daughter Alber-
tine, played by Anouk Aimée, later a
favorite actress of the New Wave direc-
tors, suddenly appears one night like an
apparition. With her pale visage as im-
passive as a statue’s—she is frequently
compared to marble—Albertine re-
mains inscrutable even as she plays
games of coquetry with the soldier at
the dinner table. In a long white gown,
the ethereal young woman glides like a
specter through the shadowy hallways,shot in soft, dreamlike tonalities by the
cinematographer Eugen Shüfftan.
At first the soldier attempts to as-
sume a similar indifference, “to op-
pose marble to marble, coldness to
coldness,” but he discovers that when
Albertine finally submits to his avidity
“that first night, she gave herself to me
with unspeakable violence.” (A shot
designed to deliver a Sadean frisson
captures her bare foot pinned under his
gleaming military boots.) Largely noc-
turnal and free of dialogue, Le Rideau
cramoisi is one of many films in the
series that relies on voice- over narra-
tion, a technique that Robert Bresson
had just perfected with Journal d’un
curé de campagne (Diary of a Country
Priest, 1951).
Astruc’s Éducation sentimentale
(Sentimental Education, 1962), made
at the apex of the New Wave, seems to
head back into the airless environs of
“the Tradition of Quality” despised by
the Cahiers critics, despite featuring
Jean- Claude Brialy, an actor favored
by Chabrol, Truffaut, and Rohmer. Os-
tensibly a modern update of the Flau-
bert novel, though the parallels appear
increasingly remote as the film pro-
gresses, Éducation sentimentale stars
Brialy as Frédéric, a retiring and un-
sophisticated young student who falls
in love with Anne, a bourgeois woman
married to a suave and abusive swin-
dler who moves through the worlds of
fashion and finance cloaked in mystery.
Shot in glistening black- and- white
widescreen, the film transpires in a
series of swank settings—elite night-
clubs, apartments stuffed with ancien
régime furniture and objets, a country
château—and fervently checklists its
signifiers of affluence (Chanel, Veuve
Clicquot 1947, Alfa Romeo), but its
luxe aura turns oppressive. UnlikeFlaubert’s novel, which so brilliantly
limns the revolution of 1848, Astruc’s
film all but ignores politics, except for
a brief moment when Frédéric discov-
ers that the beach where he and Anne
are enjoying a morning tryst contains
several monuments to the war dead.
History suddenly intrudes upon their
romance, but not long enough to
matter.Georges Franju claimed that he
learned everything he needed to know by
the age of fifteen “with the following lit-
erature: Fantômas, Freud, and the Mar-
quis de Sade.” The influence of the first
two is abundantly apparent in the con-
trasting Franju features in the series.
La Tête contre les murs (Head Againstthe Wall, 1959), shot largely in a men-
tal asylum for the sake of authenticity,
stars an anguished Jean- Pierre Mocky,
who originally planned to direct the film
himself, as a leather- jacketed delinquent
who ends up incarcerated in a psychi-
atric hospital after burning some legal
dossiers belonging to his tyrannical fa-
ther, whom he despises as an incarna-
tion of bourgeois propriety and blames
for his mother’s death. Godard best
captured the delirious tenor of La Tête
when he called it “a madly beautiful
film” and claimed that “maybe Franju
doesn’t know how to direct his actors.
But never have Jean- Pierre Mocky,
Anouk Aimée, Paul Meurisse, Pierre
Brasseur been better.... They’re not
acting. They’re trembling.”
Franju’s crime caper Judex (1963),
a fond homage to the serials of Louis
Feuillade, particularly its 1916 name-
sake and Fantômas, opens and closes
with an iris shot, in which the camera’s
aperture slowly expands or contracts so
that the image appears in an increas-
ing or decreasing circle surrounded
by black—a favorite device from silent
cinema employed by the New Wave.
This surreal adventure, pitting the
avenger and magician Judex against
the kidnapper and escape artist Diana
Monti, a nefarious cat burglar dis-
guised as a demure governess, offers
some of the most lavishly imagined
sequences in Franju’s daunting canon,
especially a costume ball during which
Judex, in elaborate avian disguise, pulls
the deadliest of tricks. Franju’s haunt-
ing oneiric imagery confirms the direc-
tor’s contention that “Judex is a film of
formal purity and, I hope, pure form.”
Franju once claimed “that every
film is a documentary, even the most
poetic.” The New Wave imported doc-
umentary into fiction and vice versa,inspired by Franju’s early nonfiction
films and by the ethnographic films of
Jean Rouch, represented in the series
by three interlocking works—Moi, un
noir (I, a Black, 1958), La Pyramide
humaine (The Human Pyramid, 1961),
and La Punition (Punishment, 1962)—
which attempt to collaborate with their
subjects, mostly young inhabitants of
Abidjan in Ivory Coast, to transform
intimate records of their everyday lives
into what would become known as
“ethnofictions.”
Ethnographic in its own idiosyncratic
way, François Reichenbach’s essay film
L’Amérique insolite (America as Seen
by a Frenchman, 1960) appears equally
influenced by Chris Marker and Ro-
land Barthes. (Marker wrote a voice-
over commentary that Reichenbach
rejected.) Reichenbach’s musing study
of America attempts to be coastally
comprehensive, opening at the Golden
Gate Bridge and concluding among the
skyscrapers of Manhattan. Reichen-
bach joins other Gallic commentators
in viewing the United States as a terri-
tory of ceaseless simulacra: a caravan
of nostalgic Texan cowboys recreating
a Wild West past, or a Mississippi pad-
dleboat called the Mark Twain passing
a Native American– themed village
amusement park where, according to
the ironic narrator, the cabin aflame
“does not burn” and the local Indians
“do not scalp.”
The filmmaker visits a prison whose
inmates are all dressed in impecca-
ble whites; obsesses over majorettes,
whom he deems a “national tradition”;
observes a Harmony Wedding Chapel,
located in a parking lot to accelerate
the matrimonial ceremony; and visits
a Red Cross class in New York where
fathers- to- be learn to bathe and feed a
baby. Everywhere Reichenbach discov-
ers grotesque consumption: a freckled
youngster devours a mammoth banana
split, while triplets gorge on hot dogs
only slightly smaller than themselves.
The director even finds in Americans’
mania for photography—the nation’s
Sunday painters at work, in his sar-
donic view—an insatiable reflex for
ingestion.Inevitably, given the New Wave’s sex-
ist nature, “Forgotten Filmmakers”
includes only one feature by a woman,
Paula Delsol’s La Dérive (The Drift-
ing, 1964), though several films in the
series focus on women’s lives. Nico
Papatakis’s exhausting Les Abysses
(The Depths, 1963), described as anar-
chic but experienced as histrionic, re-
counts the true story of Christine and
Léa Papin, sisters working as domestic
maids who took revenge on their em-
ployers in a murderous spree in 1933.
Two films are based on scripts by Mar-
guerite Duras. Henri Colpi’s Une aussi
longue absence (The Long Absence,
1961) reflects the influence of Resnais,
for whom Colpi worked as an editor, in
its portrayal of a woman (the formida-
ble Alida Valli) held captive by the be-
lief that her husband who disappeared
many years before has returned as an
amnesiac vagrant. Though the film
opens in typical New Wave fashion,
with rocker boys cranking up a café’s
jukebox and playing pinball, it quickly
settles into a Durasian exploration of
memory and loss; that jukebox soon
gets restocked with opera records as
an aide- mémoire for the distracted
tramp.Channing Pollock in Georges Franju’s Judex, 1963Janus FilmsQuandt 41 43 .indd 42 5 / 25 / 22 3 : 24 PM